Asunto: NEWS Sokker- big changes are coming!

I don't really see anything there that will actually help. As you said, what is the point of advertising in it's current state.

Why "the monthly subscription will be the most cost-effective way to buy the PLUS package"? Usually its the yearly subscription, also helps with taxes (or rather accounting). So what will be the advantage for users buying monthly subscription?

I think that they mean a long-term (for example yearly) subscription that is paid in a monthly instalment model (and then automatically renews for next year etc.)

User advantage is that you you don't have to pay up-front for whole year

Having said that, I have no effing clue why THEY would want this kind of model especially at a point when they invest plus money into the game. They should want the up from total payments so that they can invest more now. Another illogical move for me, I don't get investing time and resources into "plus shop" at this point.
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the plus will cost more.....

... and? Of course it will cost more, they already announced that long time ago. We have same plus prices that we had 15 years ago, even though there was an incredible inflation in that time and things cost x times more than they did 15 years ago.

It has no connection with the model of payment though, you will pay the same amount for a yearly (or longer) subscription, but you won't have to pay the amount up from like now, you will pay monthly instalments so I don't understand what your comment is about

Maybe he meant its not the time to make the price higher. When the user count is decreasing.

Normally the yearly subs model is better for both owners (pre-fund) and users (cheaper), so not sure what is the goal of this. Maybe they want users pay monthly because the price for monthly price is higher. But that would have to bring some advantage for the user. And that was what my question was about. Is there an advantage for me in switching into the monthly subs over paying 5 years in advance? :-).

Well from what they wrote the monthly long-term sub model will be the cheapest version

It's not very logical though because it's in their interest to receive full money in advance...

so going from lowest price to highest it should be:

- yearly full price in advance
- yearly paid in monthly instalments
- half year in advance
- half year in monthly instalments
- 3 month in advance
- 2 month in advance
- 1 month in advance

It's the only logical way unless the monthly instalments are much better for the company tax-wise, but I don't see how that could be possible.

Accounting overhead. Usually accounting companies charge per amount of invoices (they have tiers). So i do not see a scenario where it would be cheaper.

Its another mystery :D

Maybe he meant its not the time to make the price higher. When the user count is decreasing.

as for this part

Mikoos posted info about PLUS, the number of PLUS users actually increased instead of decreasing

having said that, if the user count / plus user count decreases and they have the same costs & investment needs, then it's actually logical that they would increase the price...

I think that PLUS users are core users that are not going anywhere in 95%+ and the price of plus is very low especially for richer countries. 23 euro for a yearly subscription is a joke in 2024.

Yes, but its taking a risk with core users, who are increasingly dissatisfied.
I have no problem to pay higher price.
But people want to see something that compensates the price change.

I agree the the price is a joke and that it was not changed for years.
Its just that from "marketing" point of you its risky to change the price without adding value at the same time.
For example they could have done it when they have redone the match engine. While it did not add anything, it would be understood by the community as important "investment".

I agree, I think they should have improved the prices after "saving the game" by rewriting the code & announcing all the changes that they were planning to do.

That was a smart moment for a price increase, wasted opportunity.

Now they are announcing a price increase while also saying "we are broke, basically no time & money for improving the game, it will be like now in nearest years without any big changes"
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again nothing interesting

I think the fact that he said "it's an after-hours and hobby" says it all. I didn't know that before.

Don't expect anything any time soon. Just hope for the game to keep a minimum number of users playing...

It's a shame that we still have to deal with unnecessary things like pressroom and page images when there are so many important things to do.

It's just a first step that needs to be taken in order to continue the next steps.
Let's say, you want to renovate your house, will you start painting a room that 100% surely will be broken down in order to make a different space in your home?
This is in it's core a similar situation. Why working on an old page to completly remove it and make a brand new page afterwards... If time and money are an issue, working AND paying double for the same result is completely out of the question.

What this means is this. You cook and then try to improve the appearance of the food instead of making it taste better. That's exactly what it's like

sometimes anxiety or guilt fuels motivation of working for long hours and that posion of gasoline often works to complete hard tasks in a short time, which was seen during the early times of improvements and actually devs did pretty well in a short time. Whether some kind of burnout happen on the way or they have cash issues, idk but as a tech guy I can say that everything on that dev diary mostly seems like maximum a week or two of simple frontend coding and tweaking some numbers or algos for the tax rules -considering they are now very familiar with the codebase, or they had to be for such a long time now...-

I feel like they are just trying to handle users' noise, plus memberships while throwing some random little stuff for us to discuss.

Sorry but the carrots are very lame for a long time. Calling some past player data to frontend and telling us like it's a nice important development? C'mon... Prove us you guys are actually real developers.